People are really sloppy in these discussions because they refer to people “buying tokens” which could increase or decrease the gold price, depending on whether people are buying with dollars or gold.
So let’s be a little more specific. Hopefully this will help everyone:
- Some people buy tokens with dollars, to get gold. Others buy tokens in-game with gold, to get game time.
- If there are more people buying tokens with dollars (to get gold) than there are people buying tokens off the AH with gold, the gold price goes DOWN.
- If there are more people buying tokens off the AH with gold than there are people buying tokens with dollars, the gold price goes UP.
At the start of every expansion, the gold price goes DOWN. Because a lot of returning people with a lot of dollars come back to the game, and realize “Oh, I quite the game after a month last expansion, I missed out on a bunch of cool transmogs / mounts / pets / toys / gear because I didn’t play for 2 years”. So they buy tokens with dollars and spend the gold they get on all the things they missed.
The WoW token fluctuations actually show the opposite, since if more people were spending dollars to buy boosts, the WoW token value would go DOWN, not UP. People aren’t buying carries at the start of an expansion, since the people who do the carries are doing the content themselves. Yet that’s when the token price spikes. The carry economy is so small as to be insignificant when it comes to affecting the token price, as the data shows.